Kitchen remodel: ugh but no tears

Every kitchen could use some kind of an update, whether it’s a refinish to the counter tops, a polish to the flooring, even some new knobs or pulls to the cabinet fixtures.

What’s exacerbating, most especially in this shivering economy, is knowing your kitchen could use something more than just a face lift or tooth whitening. Wholesale plastic surgery is a daunting if not harrowing realization for many, particularly if you’ve any druthers to sell or rent your home in the near future.

Facing the dilemma of spending a small fortune on a whole-kitchen redo, my spouse and I chose to get at it a small piece at a time, in what I prefer to term “digestible pieces,” an appropriate moniker considering the location.
We work as hard for our dollars as most anyone and are as protective of it as a bank vault, so seeing it leave our hands isn’t that simple a task. Nevertheless, we became the general contractor of our remodel, preferring to hire work crews specific to each job at hand, subcontracting as necessary for the most specialized jobs and overall dealing with the headaches.

So this is to be the first of several and intermittent blogs on this project, separated in time only because we’ve chosen to regain our sanity and composure after each piece is completed. We’re not the types to handle disruption of our lives in one large chunk of time, as many homeowners seem to do. Living from fridge to microwave is one thing when surviving this ordeal, it’s quite another for that to go on month after month.

No thanks. Our capacity of inconvenience — the Ugh Factor — seems to hover in the 3-day-to-a-week level, with a week-long affair of any kind to be the top-side and least likely to happen.

So, we’ve chosen to begin with our flooring, not a wholesale removal of cabinets and appliances. The Ugh Factor of that would be 2.6, to use a completely arbitrary and unmathematical method of calculation. Anything under a 0.5 is doable. Hence the floors.

As we’ve chosen not to replace but rather reface our cabinets, removing the flooring was the easiest starting point.

Out goes a three-layer nonsense of linoleum (when was that *ever* popular?) and “floating” wood that was just a plain-out bad idea and in goes new subflooring with setting for lovely porcelain tiles. Pretty, no?

Workman #1 is a nice-enough young fellow who works for a friend of mine, a stone mason with a terrific eye for workmanship. One of his workman could use the side work and he was happy to recommend him.

Buying the tile was a trip of a few stops to several specialty and big-box stores, comparing price and quality. We settled on World of Tile for little more than the variety of product specific to the job we wanted and the look we sought. Other outlets were nice, too. This one happened to work for us.

Tearing up old flooring isn’t really that difficult a process, but it surely is physical. Could I do it? Yes, of course. Would I? Surely. Did I? Nope. That’s what Matt’s for. Besides, the little extra work for him was time enough for me to sit and write this yarn.

One of the more amusing aspects of this project is how you get to see what others before you had done, a process that does little more than leave you scratching your head. “What in the world were they thinking?” is a question often heard around my home.

This time it was the flooring vent of the kitchen, which inexplicably is situated mostly underneath our tired old upper-lower refrigerator, barely a 1/4 of the vent exposed.

It was clear: move the vent. Easy? I thought so. Reality? I needed an expert, a pro of heating and ventilation. Who to call? Simple: I reached out to the furnace company that had installed my replacement furnace more than a year ago.

The guys at HomeSmart by Xcel Energy were happy to hear from me. My question was a simple one: Surely they knew of a reputable and trustworthy HVAC outfit that could do this very small job. After all, they work with these companies every day.

The answer was quick, the contacts even quicker. The fellows came by, took a look, offered an assessment and estimate: about $200, clean and done.

Fair enough. I could shop around, I suppose, but why. Their reputation preceded them and saving $50 or so didn’t seem worth all the haggling and phone calls.

So, today I spent much of my time listening as Matt tore up a fair bit of my kitchen floor while the HVAC guys coordinated with him in moving the hole for the vent (which will now sit centered in the kitchen walkway along the wall).

Tomorrow, underlayment followed by tile mud, tiles, spacers and, my favorite, grout. Four days after that, a new refrigerator. I feel so grown up.

Emilie Rusch covers retail and commercial real estate for The Post. A Wisconsin native and Mizzou graduate, she moved to Colorado in 2012. Before that, she worked at a small daily newspaper in South Dakota. It's the one with Mount Rushmore.